Philosophy: Understanding Reality and Knowledge
Why Philosophize?
To philosophize serves several key purposes:
- To rationally unravel fundamental purposes.
- To strive to achieve a universal dimension when it comes to what we all need to live well.
- To provide criteria for rational criticism, helping us fight dogmatism. These criteria are achieved through philosophical reflection.
- To argue reasons that others can understand and accept.
- To provide knowledge of various skills.
Theoretical and Practical Rationality
The Realm of Theoretical Rationality
Theoretical reason is directed towards the contemplation of the world and knowledge of reality. It encompasses all sciences and philosophy. An example is Newton’s theory.
Practical Reason
Practical reason tries to guide action towards the achievement of moral unity that reason itself has set. An example is helping the Red Cross. It involves ethics and morality.
Philosophy and Theoretical Rationality
In this dimension of philosophy, reason, in its theoretical use, aims to know reality with the greatest truth and strictness possible.
Metaphysics
- Tries to understand reality in its entirety, beyond particular objects.
- Seeks to go beyond scientific explanations.
- Has a universal outlook.
- Aims to interpret and order experience, giving an account of what exists.
- Provides bearings in the world.
Knowledge
Objective Knowledge
- Guided by the five senses.
- Everyone perceives it the same way (e.g., “the table is green”).
- We can all verify it.
- Examples: seeing the green of a field, hearing animal sounds, smelling a flower.
Subjective Knowledge
- Involves personal interpretation.
- Involves rating reality based on what one has been taught, one’s ideals, and one’s opinions.
- Influenced by values, culture, education, ideals, religion, memories, and feelings.
- Requires more explanation.
- Examples: a sense of tranquility, admiration for a landscape.
Interests of Knowledge
1. Technical: Mastery of nature (e.g., understanding the functioning of a cell, knowing how a computer or television works to fix it). This involves empirical-analytical studies, explanation, physics, and biology.
2. Practical: Understanding and communication (e.g., comprehending a book like Don Quixote, understanding the causes of the First World War, understanding historical characters and events). This involves historical-hermeneutical sciences, comprehension, and history.
3. Emancipatory: Freedom from domination and repression (e.g., studying a historical person like Darwin, helping a friend who is going through a bad time). This involves social sciences, critical psychology, and a cognitive critique of ideologies.
Possibility of Knowledge
- Dogmatism: A naive attitude of those who are secure in their knowledge without reasons. It involves being too radical. An example is a dogma of the Church.
- Skepticism: Considers it impossible to obtain reliable knowledge. There is insufficient justification for accepting something as true. It is very rational.
- Subjectivism and Relativism: Subjectivism believes that truth depends on each individual. Relativism believes that truth depends on culture, age, or social group. Universally valid truths cannot be achieved.
- Pragmatism: Identifies truth with what is useful.
- Criticism: An intermediate position between dogmatism and skepticism. It involves analyzing things from a critical perspective.
- Perspectivism: It can lead to knowledge of reality, but by combining different perspectives, because each one has its own vision of reality.
Myths and Logos: The Birth of Philosophy
Myths (Before Philosophy)
Myths are fabulous, fantastic explanations of reality that use imagination and are irrational (i.e., they do not use reason but imagination). Greek myths were born in Greece, specifically in Miletus, in the 7th century BC. Philosophy was born thanks to myths. Myths involve unproven truths.
Philosophers
Homer: An aristocrat and Greek thinker who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. His values are based on strength, bravery, and courage—the values of the wealthy.
Hesiod: A shepherd. His values are those of the poor. He wrote two works: Theogony and Works and Days. He emphasizes the power of the people and the values of humble people, fighting to survive.
Hesiod and Homer speak through the Muses, who determine who is right.
Characteristics of Myths (Fantasy)
- Appeal to irrational faith and sentiment (beliefs, feelings).
- Irrationally accepted truths (truths without verification, without reason).
- Triumph of imagination and fantasy (fairy tales, fables).
- Preaching blind obedience to authority (someone important in myths).
- Instrument of domination over the people (believed blindly).
- Includes a group of people and excludes the rest (depends on the culture and shared beliefs).
- The myth is complete (beginning and end, e.g., the Bible).
- The problem is philosophical, and the answer is mythical (e.g., the creation of the world with a mythical response, such as religion).
Logos (Philosophy)
Logos uses reason, a basic instrument of philosophy. Truths are proven and reasoned.
Characteristics of Logos (Reason)
- Rational use of reason and reflection.
- Accepted truths that can be verified with reason, reflection, and dialogue.
- Obedience to what is reasonable.
- The language of logos or reason is free (believing in a question, reasoning, and checking).
- Designed for all people.
- Logos is never finished (it is completed throughout history, e.g., a disease, life, evolution; new things are being investigated).
- The question and response are philosophical, rational, or logical (replying using science, e.g., the Big Bang).
The First Philosophers: The Presocratics (Before Socrates)
Arjés: They searched for principles in nature (trees, water, earth). Each philosopher had their own principle. They were highly cultivated individuals—physicists, mathematicians, biologists. Philosophy encompassed everything. Later, they each focused on their own areas. Philosophy owes everything to the Presocratics.
School of Miletus
Thales of Miletus: His Arjés was water, and he said that we all need it to live. He was the first philosopher in Western history and belonged to the School of Miletus. Philosophers took their surname from the city they belonged to. Thales was an important politician and mathematician who predicted an eclipse, averting a war.
Anaximander: His Arjés was the Apeiron. A thinker from Miletus, he believed that the foundation of life is the Apeiron, meaning infinity—an infinite substance from which everything comes, the substance of nature.
Anaximenes: His Arjés was air. We are surrounded by air; it is necessary for life. He proposed that if the soul is made of something, it is air. He tried to be rational and scientific.
Eleatic School
The founder of the Eleatic School was Parmenides (“the self is and is not”). The common principle of all, the Self, is the Arjés, in contrast to the School of Miletus, which believed in change, flow, and movement. The Eleatic School criticized change, arguing that there are things in nature that never change, which is the essence of things. The change we see through our senses is the appearance of things. Something that is not apparent to the senses or eyes is understood through reason, which is the basis of the Eleatic School. They criticized the School of Miletus.
Eleatic School: Metaphysical (beyond the physical, beyond nature), the world of reason.
School of Miletus: Physical, the world of the senses.